


I Love It When You Give Me Things (You Ought To Give Me Wedding Rings)

by shewho



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Idiots in Love, Just Another Anticlimactic Proposal Fic, M/M, Marriage Proposal, they're seriously like disgustingly in love guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 08:33:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20945396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewho/pseuds/shewho
Summary: It’s eight p.m. on a Tuesday when Nick finally makes his move, when the domesticity of leaning on the counter in the obnoxiously cramped kitchen, waiting for his plebeian brand of coffee to brew while Greg reads aloud headlines from the paper hejustpicked up because the evening is their morning becomesunbearable.Nick slides the box across the kitchen table, moving to sit opposite Greg and immediately wishing he’d waited for the coffee to finish. At least then he’d have something left to hold, something to do with his fidgety hands.Greg goes still – a kind of utter stillness that would be unnerving if Nick didn’t know him, but he does – apparently forgetting that he’s got his own cup of stupid-fancy coffee raised halfway to his mouth, intent on taking a sip. He sets the mug down with a softclinkand asks, enquiringly, “What’s this?”“‘S yours.”If you want it.If you wantme.





	I Love It When You Give Me Things (You Ought To Give Me Wedding Rings)

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as part of a currently-unpublished loosely-planned-out Author/Historian/Maybe Professor!Greg + Possibly Illegal But Definitely Shady Antiquities Dealer!Nick au, which explains why Nick has $48,000 to blow on an engagement ring. Just...roll with it, y’all.

It’s eight p.m. on a Tuesday when Nick finally makes his move.

Because the domesticity of leaning on the counter in the obnoxiously cramped kitchen, waiting for his plebeian brand of coffee to brew while Greg reads aloud headlines from the paper he _just _picked up because the evening is their morning is _unbearable_.

Nick slides the box across the kitchen table, moving to sit opposite Greg and immediately wishing he’d waited for the coffee to finish. At least then he’d have something left to hold, something to do with his fidgety hands.

Greg goes still – a kind of utter stillness that would be unnerving if Nick didn’t know him, but he does – apparently forgetting that he’s got his own cup of stupid-fancy coffee raised halfway to his mouth, intent on taking a sip. He’s wearing one of Nick’s ancient A&M t-shirts, threadbare under the armpits from where it’s been repeatedly tugged on, and cutoff sweatpants, product-free hair still sticking up crazily because he hasn’t bothered to shower yet.

Greg sets the mug down with a soft _clink_ and asks, enquiringly, “What’s this?”

“‘S yours.” _If you want it._

_If you want **me**._

Greg turns the box carefully between his hands, studying the flaking gold stamp on the bottom.

(It had taken Nick a solid seven months to hunt that dumb box down on eBay. Unsurprisingly, there’s not a huge market for original manufacturer packaging from the 1920′s. Because _most people_ put their jewelry in a halfway decent jewelry case, and eventually get rid of the box it came in.)

(Greg isn’t most people.)

“Where in the world did you find an original Buccellati box?” Greg asks finally, running a careful fingertip over the box’s hinge. 

“Lisbon, Wisconsin, by way of eBay,” Nick shrugs, like he’s not having a million little heart attacks as he watches Greg make no move to open said box. ”You can get anything you want on eBay if you’re willing to wait long enough.” 

_“You can get anything you want,”_ he doesn’t say, _”If you’re willing to pay stupid amounts of money to make your maybe-someday-husband smile.”_

“It’s in amazing shape,” Greg says, in that awestruck tone of wonder he gets sometimes when they run across little bits of vintage Vegas tucked away in back rooms and forgotten antique shops. Greg’s a sucker for the human elements of history, those the fingerprints of the past left behind by people lost to time and memory. ”Sometimes, you know, the velvet starts to rot and the hinges get loose and –”

(Nick’s seriously going to stroke out if Greg doesn’t just look in the fucking box.)

“_Open it_,” Nick prods the back of Greg’s hand, “Before the suspense fucking _kills_ me.”

Greg doesn’t say anything when he opens the box, just immediately flicks it closed with a soft velvet-muted _click_.

(It’s not the biggest hit Nick’s confidence has ever taken, but it’s up there. This is so not how he pictured this going.)

“That’s the Boden-Kolbe ring,” Greg says, his voice barely breaking a whisper.

“C’mon, G. You know better than that. That ring’s long gone, buried somewhere outside of Truro on Royal Kolbe’s decomposing finger.”

Greg flips the lid back open, pries the ring out and hefts it in his palm, eyes flicking between Nick’s face and the twenty-seven platinum-encased diamonds. “Are you sure? You’re _absolutely_ positive nobody dug up a grave for this?”

_“Yes,”_ Nick rolls his eyes, fighting the smile that threatens to overtake his face, “I’m sure.”

He’s absolutely sure because he spent the better part of a year searching the internet for someone who knew someone who knew someone who’d worked for Buccellati’s Milanese shop in the 20’s, who could find and then sell the original schematic drawings for the ring that Nick’s seen in old sepia-washed photos for _years_, the thing that started out as just another footnote in Greg’s endless stacks of research and then became unignorable, plastered on the front of the glossy dust jacket Nick’s seen practically every day in the last two years since Greg’s third book was published.

He’s seen that ring, and the man who wore it, and the man who bought it in a hundred different pictures, until he could probably pick Royal Kolbe and J. Montgomery Boden out of a lineup quicker than he could identify most of their neighbors. He’s absolutely sure no graves were disturbed in the acquisition of this ring because he paid a frankly obscene sum to have a point-for-point replica made just for Greg.

He remembers the first time he’d caught Greg squinting at a picture of that ring, magnified so much that the edges blurred. _“Isn’t it amazing?”_ Greg had murmured when he’d heard Nick come up behind him. _“I think that’s what I want my next book to be about: clandestine tokens of forbidden romance. I mean, can you imagine? The guts that they had? Boden to have that ring made in the first place, of course, but Kolbe? To wear it publicly? To have Boden’s claim right there on his finger in thirty-four hundred dollars’ worth of diamonds – which is, like, 48K in today’s money.” _He’d sighed and then tipped his head back to stare at Nick upside-down over the top of his chair. _“I’m tellin’ ya: high romance died with these guys, Nicky.”_

_“Sure did,”_ he’d said back, holding his tongue because Greg looked so happy.

High romance, and historians referring to your husband of forty-six years as your _companion_ or _dear friend_, and being buried on opposite coasts, and your families burning years of personal correspondence because it would bring shame on your legacies. Fucking love story rolled up inside a tragedy.

“Still think romance is dead?” Nick asks now, because Greg is still staring at the ring like maybe Kolbe’s ghost is going to materialize around it and hurtle back off the mortal coil, taking the ring with him.

“No,” Greg says, looking slightly shell-shocked. “No, it’s alive and well and living in Las Vegas.”

“Glad to hear it,” Nick laughs, reaching across the table to snatch the ring out of Greg’s open palm. “Y’know, I thought a lot about where to do this. But this – here, in our home – seemed like the best place to do it. Because I don’t care where we are – in this shoebox condo with the kitchen fit for Keebler elves and the shower with terrible water pressure, or in San Diego, or New York, or Virginia, or wherever these jobs and our life takes us – so long as I get to be with you.” 

He takes Greg’s hand in his, sliding the ring down over his knuckle and stroking it reverently. “Whaddaya think, G? You wanna marry me?”

“Yeah,” Greg says, gazing at the ring wrapped around his finger. “Yeah, yes; of course I’ll marry you.”

“Yeah?”

“‘Course,” Greg shrugs, lacing their fingers together and smiling softly as his ring catches the light. “You’re the apple of my eye. I’d pick you every time.”

Nick pretends that he isn’t smiling so hard it hurts. “You’re really fuckin’ cheesy sometimes, you know that?”

“Maybe, but you love me.” Greg sounds very sure of himself. “Even when I sound like a Hallmark card. Besides, you’re hardly one to talk. People think you’re this tough good ol’ boy former-jock, but in actuality, you’re the world’s biggest softie.”

“Maybe,” Nick repeats with a smirk, standing when the coffee machine signals that his pot is finally ready but not untwining his hand from Greg’s just yet. “Or maybe you’re just biased ‘cause _you_ love _me._”

Greg grins up at him. “So what? Doesn’t matter if I’m biased – and I’m _not _– because it’s an objective truth: you’re the softest softie ever to soft.”

“Did you just make _‘soft’_ into a verb?” Nick chuckles, pulling Greg up from the table when he refuses to let go of Nick’s hand. “Weirdo.”

“Depends,” Greg says, his voice laced with such barefaced fondness it makes Nick’s whole chest _ache_. “You gonna tell all your friends that your fiancé has a very loose grip on the conventions of grammar?”

“No, ‘cause that would be a lie. You _know _how to use it correctly, you just choose not to for aesthetic reasons, which honestly –”

Greg kisses him as if the coffeemaker isn’t beeping persistently for their attention, as if a faraway car alarm isn’t harmonizing with somebody’s equally faraway _goddamn dog_, as if the world isn’t quietly going to hell around them.

(Would that it could always be like this.)

***************

> _Mario Buccellati opened his first store in Milan in 1819, and it didn’t take long for him to become an in-demand designer for the wealthy patrons worldwide. Buccellati became a trusted confidant to those requiring jewelry for lovers under the most secretive of circumstances, and is perhaps best remembered for one piece in particular: an art deco wedding band with a diamond-studded star motif that would go on to be known as the Boden-Kolbe ring. _
> 
> _Purchased in 1924 by Mill Valley essayist J.M. Boden, the ring was first photographed at the wedding ceremony of Boden and noted translator Royal E.A. Kolbe, which took place in June of that year on the grounds of Kolbe’s Nantucket manor house (now on the National Register of Historic Places)._

[Excerpt taken from: Gregory Hojem-Sanders, _“To Live & Love Beside You”: Mementos of Marriages That History Forgot: A Century of American Marriage Amongst Men, 1900 - 2000_, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007) page 119. This book has been nominated for the_ Los Angeles Times_ Book Prize for History, as well as the Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award.]

**Author's Note:**

> FWIW, the thing about Buccellati being the guy people went to for discrete gifts for their lovers is 100% historically accurate, but it was mostly for dudes’ fancy mistresses, not gay weddings that I made up because I, too, am a sappy fuck with a history degree.
> 
> Title comes from Peter Gabriel’s song _“The Book of Love”,_ which is versatile as all _hell_ if you’re looking for a ship song, ijs.


End file.
